First Fridays

Many cities and towns across the country have a First Friday celebration where local shops stay open later in the evening, allowing for folks to mingle with the artists and craftspeople and to hopefully buy some of the artists' fine work.  I never have enough "stuff" to sell at farmers' markets or even at a cooperative artists' guild (of which there are two in my area), but to inspire readers, I will be posting a new useful, crafty thing every first Friday.

This month's topic is the feed-bag-converted-into-grocery-bag.  There are several websites which outline this process.  One can be found here and the other is found here.  But if you google "recycling feed bags into grocery bags" a gazillion and one sites pop up.  Who knew?  I first learned about this at my spinning group where a 4H leader was doing this with her group.  I saw the finished bags in the 4H pavillion at the County Fair and they turned out really well.

Anyway, you do not have to be an expert sewer to do this.  I honestly do not get along with my sewing machine.  We have a very fragile truce which lets me do simple things (like make curtains).  Anything more complex, including quilting, and it balks (or I balk). I don't know anything about the specific types of stitches  or thread I should have used, but I did change to a size 18 or 19 needle (the largest, green one) because I was working with this feed bag material.

 So, my starting piece was a chicken feed bag that had looked something like this (okay, it looked exactly like this except that there was no feed in it).   

The finished product, after consulting the websites linked above, and spending about 45 minutes with the machine, looked like this:

 

For those of you who are expert seamstresses, I did not have a ruler or other measuring tool with me at any point during the making of this--it was all sort of eye-balled.  Also, the seams are by no means even or pretty-looking (which is why you don't get a close-up shot).

The bag hasn't really been tested yet aside from putting a couple jars of pickles, and a half gallon container of milk in it (those were the heavy things in my fridge), but I think it will do okay when I take it to the Farmers' Market tomorrow.

I'm thinking these would make great gifts (except for the price of the thread, and the electricity used by the sewing machine, they're free) especially if they are filled up with other crafty or homemade goodies.  

Happy sewing and TGIF!